More than Munich: The forgotten Legacy of Neville Chamberlain

By Andrew Reekes

In 1938 rapturous crowds greeted Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain when he proclaimed “Peace for our time” on his return from meeting Adolf Hitler in Munich. Yet today Chamberlain is vilified as a naïve appeaser – an image cynically cultivated by Winston Churchill for his own political gain.

What is the truth? How should Birmingham’s only Prime Minister be accurately remembered?

More than Munich: The forgotten legacy of Neville Chamberlain reveals that he was the most successful social reformer of interwar Britain. For 36 years, first as Lord Mayor of Birmingham and then as an energetic and determined Minister of Health, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister, Chamberlain delivered legislation which cleared some of the poorest slums; built thousands of council houses; extended unemployment benefits; improved pensions; made paid holidays mandatory; and limited working hours.

Contrary to the image often portrayed in books and films, Chamberlain did not leave Britain naked and defenseless. From the mid-1930s he recognized the Nazi threat, forcefully argued for re-armament and particularly urged the strengthening of the Royal Air Force. Now historian and author Andrew Reekes challenges us to look beyond the stereotype of Neville Chamberlain “the appeaser” to the real man and his achievements.

• Language: English
• Publisher: History West Midlands
• Release date: Sep 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781905036530

Andrew Reekes

Author Andrew Reekes was a scholar of Exeter College Oxford. He was Sub Warden at Radley College, and formerly Head of History at Tonbridge, Cranleigh and Cheltenham Colleges. He was a Chief Examiner and school inspector as well as running two Prep Schools. He has completed post-graduate research at the University of Birmingham onJoseph Chamberlain and the 1906 Election, and is the author of The Rise of Labour 1899–1951 (1991) and Speeches that Changed Britain: Oratory in Birmingham (2015).

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INTRODUCTION

In the traumatic shadow of the Dunkirk evacuation at the end of May 1940 three journalists, under the nom de plume ‘Cato’, published a devastating polemic against the Chamberlain government, entitled Guilty Men. The Dunkirk debacle, the serial instances of rank incompetence which comprised the preceding Norwegian campaign, and the perceived inadequacies of re-armament between 1935 and 1939 were all squarely blamed on Neville Chamberlain and his Cabinet, the ‘guilty men’ of the title. Cato skilfully contrasted the harrowing experiences of inadequately equipped British soldiers, who had been battered by superior German armour in the sand dunes of Dunkirk, with the insouciance of Prime Minister Chamberlain, when he boasted in March 1938 of ‘the almost terrifying power that Britain is building up’.

Mary Evans/Alinari Archives

Chamberlain, Churchill and their Conservative cabinet colleagues, 1939. These were the men vilified by ‘Cato’ as deluded and inept in their dealings with Hitler.

Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham, NC/17/1/19/20

Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham, NC/17/1/19/86

Neville Chamberlain returns from the meeting with Hitler in Munich, 1938. In these famous images, he is hailed by journalists and large crowds.

Cato’s charge – that war came in 1938 because of the mismanagement of a hopelessly inept, and dangerously deluded, government – was one that resonated in those dark days, as Hitler’s Blitzkrieg swept through France and the Low Countries. The powerful tract had its visual counterparts in two portentous images from that year. Firstly, that of Neville Chamberlain being greeted at Heston aerodrome, on his return from Munich on 30 September; huge crowds deliriously celebrated the avoidance of war. Every reprint subsequently reminded the British people of the false hopes raised by Munich. Secondly, there was a much-reproduced clip of newsreel film showing Prime Minister Chamberlain back in 10 Downing Street; his injudicious words from the first-floor window to the milling crowds below would swiftly return to haunt him – ‘my good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour. I believe it is peace in our time.’

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‘I believe it is peace in our time’. Neville Chamberlain addresses the crowds from a first-floor window at 10 Downing Street.

Cato, those graphic images, and the self-serving history of victorious Prime Minister Winston Churchill (The Gathering Storm) after the war’s end, have influenced Neville Chamberlain’s reputation ever since. The considerable body of revisionist writing by historians from the mid-1960s onwards has done little to shift a deeply rooted public perception of Chamberlain as the leading ‘guilty man’. Generations of politicians from Anthony Eden to Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair thought there were lessons to be learned from the seeming failure of Chamberlain’s policy of Appeasement at Munich. It became instead the justification for resolute military action.

Neville Chamberlain is not even honoured in his home city of Birmingham, despite all that he achieved as councillor, as Lord Mayor, and as a guiding light of Birmingham’s health reforms. One solitary blue plaque in Westbourne Road, Edgbaston comprises the unique memorial to the city’s only Prime Minister.

This short publication sets out to recast his reputation by describing Neville Chamberlain’s considerable legacy, one which has been overshadowed by the popular focus on his last years, those in which as Prime Minister he sought unsuccessfully to repel the international forces of Fascism. For, by contrast, it can be convincingly argued that Neville Chamberlain was the most significant and effective British social reformer in the interwar years. Had he died in the same year as his brother Austen (1935) – before he became Prime Minister – he would have been celebrated as a minister who, despite being a trifle austere and chilly, was the most imaginative, energetic and constructive architect of housing, planning and welfare reform in Britain before Beveridge; while as Chancellor he would have been hailed as the country’s saviour, having steered Britain away from the rocks of insolvency which threatened to wreck the economy in 1931.

FORMATIVE YEARS

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The Chamberlain family c.1905: Neville (back left), in his mid-30s, with brother Austen and father Joseph (back right). Mary Chamberlain, Neville’s step-mother and sister Beatrice seated right and left.

Neville Chamberlain was born in March 1869, the son of Joseph Chamberlain – at this moment just embarking on a political career on the Birmingham Town Council and at the heart of a national pressure group, the National Education League – and of his second wife Florence. Neville was to be one of four siblings; he also had a half-brother (Austen) and half-sister (Beatrice) from Joseph’s first marriage to Florence’s sister Harriet. The family was tight-knit and extended to embrace the Kenricks (Florence’s kin) and Joseph’s brothers and their families. Their sustenance proved invaluable when, on Florence’s death in 1875, Joseph found himself once again a widower. Although there was much mutual support from uncles, aunts and cousins, Joseph Chamberlain’s grief cast a pall over the household, and he himself seemed emotionally frozen. Neville did not show an interest in politics (as Austen did) and the one point of contact seems to have been botanical, father and son sharing a love of hothouse plants. Neville developed an abiding interest in the natural world, his one contribution at Rugby, where he was in the shadow of his high-achieving brother, being to participate in the school’s Natural History Society. In other ways, he seems to have been a disappointment to a father who moved him from the more prestigious classical side at Rugby to study in the ‘modern’ stream, in preparation for a career in commerce.

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Highbury, the Chamberlain family home, commissioned by Joseph in 1878.

Rather than send him to follow Austen to Cambridge, Joseph enrolled him in Mason’s College in Birmingham where he would study maths, metallurgy and engineering. After a brief stint as an accountant Neville was then commissioned by his father to purchase and to run a sisal plantation on Andros in the Bahamas. It was an extraordinary gamble to restore the family’s distressed finances which had suffered after the stock market crash in 1890, particularly affecting their Argentinian investments. Neville threw himself into what proved a daunting task. His health suffered; he was lonely and felt isolated from his family; he was weighed down by feeling responsible for the plantation’s failure, the sisal crops proving disappointing. He returned after six years worn down by the exertion. Yet the experience helped shape him.

It certainly impressed Winston Churchill; of a dinner with the Chamberlains in the early months of the Second World War, he wrote in The Gathering Storm of how Neville talked of ‘his six-year struggle’ to grow sisal on a barren islet in the Bahamas. He had done so out of conviction just as much as out of a sense of family duty. He had endured hurricanes, ‘lived nearly naked’, had physically laboured to construct a small harbour and a tramway, and generally ‘led a